Of course, Apple isn't the only company out there who makes UI mistakes. And it is notable that the article has totally annoying, unstoppable GIFs that do nothing to improve understanding. User Interfaces are hard, but it would be nice to have everybody take a few steps back from the precipice.

The Apple Music player app on IOS used to be at least usable. Now I have to google to figure out how to turn shuffle on and off. Everything is obscure and hidden where it used to be at least semi obvious. Controls are tiny when they used to be big enough for even my sausage fingers on a small screen,

Please, please, please stop making everything an "intuitive" icon with no easy way to get text to tell you what a button is supposed to do.

Not everyone is constantly using the same program and wants to just start guessing what menu icons do in the hopes of figuring out over time how to work the damn app!

That's my biggest issue with these minimalist pretty designs, half the time you can't figure out what the stupid menu options actually do, let alone find the one you figure should be in there but who knows what it looks like. Don't get me started on mysterious gestures being required for an app.

This lack of basic usability is one of the two major reasons Apple mobile products are banned for technical support in my family now. The other is the walled garden, but I digress..../rant

If you really insist on doing so, you can feel free to be the alpha testers for this non-working feature, and graciously supply multiple samples of your voice, to be analyzed with millions of others, so that this problem can be possibly solved in the future.

> graciously supply multiple samples of your voice, to be analyzed with millions of others,

It doesn't work. Vlingo lost patent wars, and eventually got bought, pretending that gazillions of speech samples would ever solve the problems with indeterminate text searches, local accents, and the rotten quality of small microphones in noisy environments with speech analysis techniques that haven't fundamentally changed since before any of its founders were in diapers. They and their colleagues just wrap more a

Siri doesn't always work. It's not like the computer in Star Trek. But it works very well in limited contexts, and within these contexts is a powerful way of using your phone.

Not to mention, there are times (more often than not) when you don't want to be shouting at your phone in public....

I don't like doing that while at work....or in a restaurant maybe or bar...etc.

This brings me to another pet peeve I have...when calling into tech support or anything these days...the auto phone robots want you to speak what you want instead of s simple press a number to make a selection. I HATE having to talk like an idiot to a robot in public....

The voice thing is fun from time to time, but I don't like doing it out while in public, and I get annoyed when others are doing it in a restaurant or other crowded venue.....

Siri is NOWHERE near understanding casual speech. It understands keywords and does some very clever context searching, but its not like talking to a person at all. Voice command is just one tool in the toolbox, nothing more. SIRI is a fancy voice command system, not a natural speech interpreter.

It might not recognize your voice correctly (in my case, Siri only understands about 20% of my questions). Apple's voice recognition requires Internet access for many of its functions (limiting functionality for people with no or small data-plans, or using Wi-Fi devices where there is no open accesspoint). Some songs have difficult to pronounce names. Sometimes it may not be appropriate to talk (for instance, in a library). Or perhaps I just don't know the name (but I

I don't want to be talking to my phone or iPod at the gym so everyone can hear that I want to listen to. I've gotten used to the UI, but having to scroll all the way back up to switch from Song to Artist view, etc. is a PITA. I'm no Apple fanboi, but I'll say, my 9 year old daughter really likes it.

One thing that I think Apple got mostly right is AppleTV. I'm not crazy about the remote, but the interface is nice for a 10-foot one (except for Netflix, but I can't put that on Apple). My kids have found new uses for it like playing single-player games (word guessing, geography, and all sorts of stuff) with others. It's a use that I didn't even consider when I bought it.

I have also had two Google TVs, two FireTVs, and two "smart TVs" (LG and now Samsung). Apple is easier to use them, except maybe Google TV, in my eyes. Google TV was awesome because it would search everything, not just the stuff they were selling like Apple TV does. Now, iTunes... that's another story. I've pretty much stopped using it because it just sucks.

This. I hate the new music player with a passion. What used to take one or two clearly intuitive clicks is now so incredibly confusing that it borders on unusable. Now everything is behind generic "hotdog", "hamburger", and barely noticeable arrow icons and it's impossible to remember what's supposed to happen when you click any of them. I spend so much time cursing at it because I often choose the wrong icon and then have to figure out how to get back to where I was and what I was trying to do in the first place. It took me 20 minutes of fiddling around to figure out how to bring up the album for the currently playing song.
I guess they want you to ask Siri to do everything for you, but that's just exchanging one frustrating interface for another.

I find it funny that people are complaining about inscrutiable icons on a site where the very name of the site sounds like the command prompt.

That's because you can always type "command --help" and figure out what a command does. Or "man command." It's clear, discoverable, and consistent. Whereas this beautiful icon set [imgur.com] has no particular explanation..........

Man pages don't help you discover new commands. They're best if you know the command, but aren't sure the syntax of the different options. If you don't know the command in the first place, man pages are useless. They're basically only good for people who don't need them but may find them convenient from time to time.

CLIs will never be discoverable. UIs with menus and especially context (right-click) menus were great for discoverability. A UI where there's no menus, no confirmation that a change took effect, and no universal way to undo? No thanks.

Talking of universal ways to undo, I think it's tragic that we've lose the "OK | Apply | Cancel" paradigm. Microsoft came up with that in Windows 95 (or was it 3.x?) and I must have subconsciously used it countless times to just say "no, screw it, don't make ANY of those changes for now." Instead with Windows 10, they've jumped on the fucking stupid bandwagon of everybody else and now once something is changed, that's it. It's done and you have to remember exactly what to change back.

Browse vs Search.
It's the age old UI delimma that never fails to confuse interface designers. If anyone out there happens to be one of these clowns, please ensure your system always includes BOTH browse and search options for commands.

my comment on apropos [slashdot.org]. Regarding google, if a UI would require you to go to a google search each time you needed to figure out how to do something, would you call this intuitive or discoverable?

Regarding google, if a UI would require you to go to a google search each time you needed to figure out how to do something, would you call this intuitive or discoverable?

As it happens, every machine requires you to RTFM or risk ending up on one of those funny home video tv programs (or the emergency room). The idea that computers, which are easily the most complex machines humanity currently has, should be the exception is utterly delusional.

I'm complaining about stupid things such as on the main screen when playing music there is a button for shuffling music but it doesn't tell you the status of the shuffle and when you press it it only turns shuffle on, never off. To turn shuffle off, or even see the status, you have to expand the mini player, use the shuffle button in there, and then swipe that down to return back to your music. That's just bad design. Sure it looks pretty but the usability sucks.

I think the complaint with Apple's UI trend is not so much based on the assert of the command prompt's superiority; but the fact that Apple used to build GUIs with the objective(usually fairly successful) of being trivially discoverable, relatively forgiving, and fairly aggressively non-modal.

Now, for reasons that seem increasingly driven by a fetish for minimalism, their buttons are getting smaller and less intuitive, sometimes wholly invisible until you know what edge of the screen to swipe and in what

I would call it Orwellian that Apple would make your computer better by limiting what it can do. I would call it Orwellian that Apple would market its self to young, hip, free-thinking individualists, then put a Berlin Wall in between you and the software you want to run.

Sure, you can turn it off.... But most users won't even know it is there. They'll be completely clueless as to the reason why a completely legitimate piece of commercial software can't install or run, failing with a perplexing error about it being "unrecognized". I know this is what happens, because this is the point in the story where my company gets a phone call.

The adjective Orwellian refers to these behaviours of The Party, especially when the Party is the State:

Invasion of personal privacy, either directly physically or indirectly by surveillance.
State control of its citizens' daily life, as in a "Big Brother" society.
Official encouragement of policies contributing to the socio-economic disintegration of the family or any other c

the person who created the itunes interface for windows is a nice example of sucking at your job. The only good think about that half ass product is the installer. Everything else goes against any logic and works 180 degrees differently than any product in windows. I am sure they did the same on linux. Forcing their stupid design ui logic on operating systems which work differently. I would fire that guy faster than it takes Oprah to eat an apple cake.

While I overall like ios, the usability changes are always puzzling, and you point out what I consider the worst: anything related to getting my music to play.

The ios side of things features this SUPER TINY progress bar, in a mode when that is likely to be your primary piece where you need precision interface. It's not obvious how to get the album art to pull up, and there's no way to make it full screen, or do anything cool, like cycle through album art pieces, or display a second one. It's difficult to

The Apple Music player app on IOS used to be at least usable. Now I have to google to figure out how to turn shuffle on and off. Everything is obscure and hidden where it used to be at least semi obvious.

The new music app is one of the most annoying changes in iOS recently. It's down to those little things that chase aesthetics instead of usability like the alphabet scrollbar, instead of being visible immediately you actually have to start manually scrolling to make it appear and then you can use it. It's just a pointless decision that makes no sense in the context of usability.

They did a similar thing with desktop safari some time ago where the close button for the tab wasn't visible until you hovered the

A lot of the functionality of the iTunes UI has fallen to the wayside.

I dread every iTunes update as I know I will have to change things back around to the way I like them from the way that Apple thinks I should like them.

And in a sort of related issue, the recent revelation that Siri won't answer music related questions unless you have a current subscription to Apple's music service is both worrisome and telling about the direction that Apple is taking.

It is good to see others who have also noticed that Apple may have lost its way regarding user-centric design.

TFA misses the point. Apple hasn't "lost its way" -- most of the design changes are clearly on purpose. It follows the classic cult paradigm of keeping esoteric knowledge for the "in-crowd."

I admire Apple, and I use many of its products, so don't dismiss me as a "hater." Hear me out. First, Apple made inroads into certain cultural groups and convinced them that "Mac" was superior to clunky Windows. Then those cultural trendsetters came to be "believers" in all things Apple. A few really good products (e.g., the early iPod designs) helped cement this.

Next step: make your interfaces LESS discoverable, and more dependent on "in-crowd knowledge." This reinforces the cult mindset, creating even more of a feeling that Mac/Apple product users are "in the know" -- knowledge about how to use things is passed between people directly by demonstration, rather than discoverable on your own or with a manual. (No manuals shipped with products anymore either, so unless you specifically go online and try to download one, you're forced to network with other Mac/iPod/iPhone/iPad/etc. users to figure out how to do anything.)

This is the creation of a sort of what cultural historians and sociologists sometimes call an "Imaginary Community" of like-minded folks. You divide up the world into "Mac users" and everyone else.

But non-discoverable interfaces also have the side effect of creating patentable UI structures (like icon sets, or special gesture interfaces), which other non-Apple companies will have to license, if they hope to be compatible with Mac users' expectations. That's the logic likely behind all of the big companies pushing obscure graphical icons ("What the heck does that weird trapezoid with a swirly do?") -- the MS Office Ribbon, Gmail getting rid of text on buttons, and Apple are all trying to win at the same game: they want users to get "locked in" and used to their particular interface, which is only understandable with practice, deliberately NOT discoverable. Discoverable interfaces allow people to switch companies/software/products -- the big tech companies want you to be so stuck with their product that you won't even know how to use another's product.

That's the reason behind TFA's main complaint -- UI design is no longer about ease of use. It is only about that when a company wants to become established. After that, these companies want to force customers to stay, which means creating custom "parts" which are not interchangeable with anyone else's. In the old days, those parts were literal physical things; now they are stuff like icon sets and specific learned (and hopefully patentable!) non-discoverable gestures and UI tricks.

IBM lost the war back in the 80s when it tried to be an open standard for everyone, which just led other companies to pull ahead after all of IBM's hard work in setting the standard. All tech companies learned that lesson.

So, TFA completely misses the point. As TFA notes, Apple products strive to be beautiful -- that's part of the "wow" factor that makes you want to join the cult. Then you join and learn all the esoteric gestures (used to be secret handshakes, now it's how you swipe with three fingers and click or whatever), which you pass along to your fellow cult members. You also learn to decode the secret symbols of the cult by clicking on weird ambiguous pictures rather than self-explanatory words.

I've launched a program in 3 clicks. Meanwhile, you're still typing in the name of yours, and waiting for search results to return from the internet. What, you thought search was slow because your Mac is just old and you need a new one? LOL!

Okay, but iOS i still easier to use compared to Android, which is why I steer my parents and any other people who are likely to want computer support toward iOS devices whenever it makes sense.

My mom was more productive on her iPad after a week of using it than she was with her Galaxy S2 after 3 years.

And I can tell you stories about how my parents have continuously screwed up everything they have done with their iPad for the past 5 years. So what? -- older people are going to have trouble with lots of these interfaces, because there's nothing there to explain anything.
What's wrong with having TEXT buttons or menus (even as an OPTION) on a large iPad screen? You don't have the excuse of "It's a phone; there's no room." There is room. And then I could tell them to go to menu X, select clearly labele

Back in the old days before graphical user interfaces, test UIs were generally usable because the design elements were much more limited. No graphics, no fancy fonts, no dark green on almost dark green links (like the ones that appear in the story titles of slashdot).

Tools like MC (midnight commander on linux) have an ease of use and simplicity that is hard to beat. Same with Borland's non-gui IDEs for BASIC, C/C++, Pascal, and dBASE.

HTML, which was supposed to separate content from presentation, no longer does, thanks to "advances" that have strayed too far from first principles. We have seen the enemy, and it's not just those who write the code, but also the marketers who demand more bling over functionality, and the customers who respond to bling because BLING.

HTML, which was supposed to separate content from presentation, no longer does,

This one really annoys me, because it would be so simple to do. If HTML allowed constants, you could have one place (a separate file, or put them at the top of your file) where all your text and images are defined. Then you could build the HTML, and easily move your constants around as the design changed. Simple solution, easy to implement, effective.

It would also solve the problem that CSS has, where you want to use the same color scheme in several different elements; but if you want to change the color

Those asinine, time-burglar eye candy transitions that occur for nearly every navigation you performed within iOS. Some of the most egregious ones can be "disabled" the 'Reduce Motion' option but rather than disable nausea-inducing animations like zoom it simply switches it to a dissolve, which executes just as slowly. And there is still no way to disable the most common animations like the sweep in an iOS Navigation Controller. I almost want to start a petition to all iOS developers to universally set the 'animate' parameter to False for all internal iOs methods that get passed the parameter.

My biggest gripe with Apple and Microsoft right now is the lack of progress bars throughout the OS. For example, when Windows 10 boots the first time it goes through all this "Let's get started..." "Just setting up a few things..." etc. But you literally have no idea how long it is going to be before you use the computer, and on a tablet device it can be quite some time. I feel like this is a huge UI miss. One step forward, two steps back.

The reason they got rid of progress bars in many cases is because they never figured out a good way of making them even remotely accurate. Often, things would breeze through 95% of the progress bar only to get stuck in the last 5%.

There is, and has been since the lauded CLI "GUIs" (e.g. turbo pascal), a simple solution to this problem. Unfortunately many people simply don't understand the solution, and don't care to learn. In two steps:

1. Use an infinite progress bar (with or without a counter / percentage) rather than one based on time, when time is unknown or highly variable.
2. 'Step' the progress bar in code, don't use some automatically animated thing.

This provides positive user feedback that the operation will take an ind

> Nearly all modern infinite progress indicators (computer, web, or mobile) fail because they use things like animated gifs or a separate thread to keep the indicator animation running, even when the task it's supposed to represent is stopped or slow.

Yea, I hate this. This is worse than no progress bar. "Oh, good, you managed to not break the computer so hard it can still update the monitor. Great status indicator:/ "

This is just a logical progression from what they did many years ago. Windows 7 introduced the progress bar inside the progress bar. You have no idea how angry I was the first time I saw the progress bar get to 100% only to start again at 0% without warning nor reason.

If there are multiple progresses to track then the old school setup from the floppy disc days which showed an overall progress followed by a sectional progress was the way to go, but really the stupid spiny rings, flashing dots, or that progress bar which just moves a small line inside a box over and over again are worthless. They don't even serve as an indication that your computer hasn't locked up since typically the only thing that will stop those dead in their tracks is a bluescreen.

Why can I never figure out where a link is going? Read back over that. There are two hyperlinks in the summary. One is "an article by two early Apple designers" the other is "lost its marbles when it comes to user interface design."

So which one of those goes to the article that the summary is about? It's the second! That's so counter-intuitive! Seriously! Why do I have to click through your links to figure out what you're linking to?

With the latest version of Safari, Apple removed from the right mouse click* contextual menu the ability to create a new tab. So instead of "right click, select the top item on the menu, left click" the only way now to create a tab is to either use the file menu or keyboard options. The contextual menu option of creating tabs has been like that for years and years and was not broken and I knew of no complaints about it. Removing it would have been a deliberate action that as far as I can see serves no purpose as the right click contextual menu still exists. And to add insult to injury the item that is now on the top of that list is "close tab", so every time my muscle memory kicks in I end up closing a tab I was viewing rather than opening a new tab.

* Yes, you can use non-apple mice with apple computers, and yes the right mouse button does work. And in general I dislike using Apple's mice and only use 3rd party mice (And Microsoft makes good mice and keyboards that I like and use as does Kensington)

I was talking about a blank tab, and not opening an existing link in a new tab. So your only relevant suggestions are the "+" and the "T". Both of which are inferior to what has been taken away. The "+" places the tab at the far right and not where I want it, the "T" requires me to move my hands around when I didn't have to before.

Yes I could, but the advantage of the contextual menu click was that I could open up a new tab in proximity to another tab. And in that way keep things arranged the way I wanted rather than open up a tab at the far right and then drag the new tab to where I originally wanted it in the first place.

IE has been pants-on-head retarded since IE9.
Chrome's fame went to it's head, and now it's all strung out on bad design philosophy and arrogance. Only a matter of time until it dies.
Mozilla used to be lawful evil, but has injected its self with Chrome DNA so many times that it morphed into a flaming fox and became chaotic evil.
Opera is an undead paladin... It used to be so holy and pure, but now it has turned. Once the holy magic of Netscape filled its body, as it did Mozilla's. The evil power of webkit flows strongly through this one, as it does through all 'modern' browsers.
Safari is the last dark weapon Sauron forged before his death.

Three tabs for the Millenians under the sky
Seven for the neck-beards in their basements of stone
Nine for Windows users, doomed to die
One for Dark Lord Jobs on his throne
In the land of Cupertino, where shadows lie.

tl;dr Criticizing design is easy. Any grad student that's taken a human interface class could write this article (and many do) illustrating how a certain design violates the criteria they just learned. But despite their background I would only start to take these guys seriously when they propose a touch interface designed for phones which has all the properties they espouse and retains all the utility of a modern smartphone. Sure it would be great if every single feature was immediately visually discoverable. But how do you do that when you have so little screen space? Do you sacrifice content for UI? Let's see their great alternative.

To respond to their points in detail:

Apple has, in striving for beauty, created fonts that are so small or thin, coupled with low contrast, that they are difficult or impossible for many people with normal vision to read

You know how they say lead with your strongest point? Right off the bat the first thing they claim is that Apple's fonts are impossible for many people with normal vision to read. Nevermind many, show me a single person with normal vision that CANNOT read Apple fonts and I will save their life, because clearly they have a brain tumour and need treatment immediately.Why would anyone take this article seriously when it leads with provably false claims? Anyway let's move on..

These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations

Of course much of the science was based on a mouse and keyboard interaction on a computer, not touch on mobile.

However, when Apple moved to gestural-based interfaces with the first iPhone, followed by its tablets, it deliberately and consciously threw out many of the key Apple principles.

This is why those interfaces work. Let's take a scrolling view for example. The traditional approach is to put a scrollbar in, and that's what most everyone was doing before the iPhone came along. The scrollbar is discoverable and it provides visual feedback. Sounds good right? Well it turns out using a scrollbar on a mobile device is a miserable experience. Swipe to scroll turned out to be the vastly superior method, and as soon as you learn to swipe (my 1 year old figured it out watching me) it is trivially easy to operate without any additional visual clutter.

Same with other gestures in the iPhone.Deleting a row in a table. You can put a button on every row to make that discoverable at the cost of high risk of accidental deletion and visual noise, or you can make rows swipe left to expose the delete function. The swipe once learned in 5 seconds is vastly superior for the rest of your lifetime using it.Accessing the notification centre by swiping down from the top. You could put a button on every single screen, or you could save the space and use a swipe. Clearly the swipe is far preferable to using up screen space on a 4-5" screen.

A woman told one of us that she had to use Apple’s assistive tool to make Apple’s undersize fonts large and contrasty enough to be readable.

So a person with a visual impairment used accessibility options to correct for it? This is a problem how? Later they confuse font weight with font size. Both are adjustable in iOS, of course if you really need very large fonts you will run into some sizing issues in some apps.

What kind of design philosophy requires millions of its users to have to pretend they are disabled in order to be able to use the product?

A vision impairment is a disability. A minor and common one, but still one. By the way, the common way to correct this disability is with glasses. I have poor vision, but never had an issue with reading Apple fonts because I've corrected my vision by wearing glasses. The author's implication that someone with a disability should be asha

This, a 100 times. It is easy to criticize from your armchair. Much harder to provide a complete example of an alternative that incorporates all the changes you are asking for, on a mobile platform. I am not an iphone user and prefer Android devices. One of the issues for me is that Apple mobile interface uses too much precious screen space for "discoverability". The author is asking for more of them. And people like me are asking for less. Many users come to accept the fact that on a mobile platform

But how do you do that when you have so little screen space? Do you sacrifice content for UI?

My biggest complaint about the direction UI have been moving is that EVERYTHING is being shifted to this concept. My desktop monitor is the size of a small television, you don't need to hide everything in tiny drop-down menus. Because designers are trying to make all interfaces the same they are working to the smallest denominator (phone screen) instead of optimizing interfaces for their intended usage.

The problem is half with the hardware. Just sticking to the touch screen is not enough. We need smartphones to come with a button or two extra just used for interacting with apps (and maybe one more specifically designed to bring up the menu of the current running application).

This is why those interfaces work. Let's take a scrolling view for example. The traditional approach is to put a scrollbar in, and that's what most everyone was doing before the iPhone came along. The scrollbar is discoverable and it provides visual feedback. Sounds good right? Well it turns out using a scrollbar on a mobile device is a miserable experience

What sucks is that they're taking the mobile solution, and applying it to PCs (and websites viewed on PCs). Minimalist UIs on my huge 1650x1050 monitor look downright ridiculous. Just how much space does one need for content? My screen has plenty. Give me bug buttons with text! And scrollbars? No, I don't want it hidden. Show it all the time and make it big and chunky enough for me to click on easily!

Basically, acknowledge that mobile and PC user interfaces can and SHOULD be rather different. This principle will never change.

The scrollbar is discoverable and it provides visual feedback. Sounds good right? Well it turns out using a scrollbar on a mobile device is a miserable experience. Swipe to scroll turned out to be the vastly superior method, and as soon as you learn to swipe (my 1 year old figured it out watching me) it is trivially easy to operate without any additional visual clutter.

At the loss of discoverability.

While I agree--I wouldn't want to play with scrollbars on my phone--I'll add that you lose the ability to know if information is outside of your view. That's part of the "discoverability."

Here's a personal example: Back in iOS 7, I believe, the Weather app on the iPhone would show you the temperature. Tap on the temperature--how I knew to do that is lost to my memory--and it would show you other information--barometer, wind direction and speed, etc. When I upgraded to iOS

You say that like it isn't true. The market has spoken, and Justin Bieber's music is good for the target population. if it wasn't. it wouldn't sell. Just like McDonalds food is good because it hits a sweet spot between convenience, price, and taste. Market appeal is a better indicator of overall goodness than most measures, because it is not subject to your particular definition of what constitutes good.

By the way, by market share we can objectively say that Android is better for the worldwide market t

Not sure who originated it, perhaps it was Apple, but the entire minimalist "flat" design paradigm is a UI shipwreck. Yet, everyone is jumping onto the badwagon, regardless of how awful it is. Apple, Android, Windows 10, even Gnome and to a lesser extent KDE are leaning in that direction.

It's pure shit. There's no definition or contrast. Where once you had hierarchical menus you now have hidden widgets, triple dots and hamburgers. Hamburgers? WTF? You have to swipe with two, three, four fingers? There's no control object, not even a visual clue of any kind? It's very much like the command line, but you have to touch/click it.

When Microsoft came out with the ribbon, I thought, this is bad. But, when the flat minimalist shit started, it was SO much worse. I look forward to the return of the discoverable and logical UI.

It originated from Jonathan Ive, Apple's lead hardware designer who now have purview over the software's aesthetics as well. Ive hated the skeuomorphism elements of iOS and IMO went completely overboard with the horrible flat UX that is now iOS. For example changing buttons to a text label without even a border? WTF? One of the most basic elements of UX since the dawn of GUIs.

It originated from Jonathan Ive, Apple's lead hardware designer who now have purview over the software's aesthetics as well. Ive hated the skeuomorphism elements of iOS and IMO went completely overboard with the horrible flat UX that is now iOS. For example changing buttons to a text label without even a border? WTF? One of the most basic elements of UX since the dawn of GUIs.

One thing that is important to remember is that the usefulness of similarity to real-world objects is changing over time. Back when filing cabinets were common "files and folders" was a useful analogy. You could show me a rotary dial phone and I'd figure it's for calling people, a gramophone and it'd be for playing music but many of the current generation would be blank. Before a button had to be a button so you could physically press it and we carried that over to mouse pointers. With touchscreens maybe th

Apple was actually one of the last of the big companies to adopt the flat UI style. Microsoft was first.

I don't think it's fair to credit/blame Jonathan Ive or any other Apple employee with inventing it. The flat UI was probably invented by someone at Microsoft. MS itself claims that it was a community effort. See here for example: https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com]

Not sure who originated it, perhaps it was Apple, but the entire minimalist "flat" design paradigm is a UI shipwreck.

It wasn't too bad before the whole skeuomorphism reversal. I think Apple overreacted when they dumped that design philosophy and they went too far in the other direction. (but skeuomorphism was something that was really starting to annoy me) For example, buttons in iOS used to have nice "button-y" like visual appearances. Now they are simply a line of text that you are supposed to guess is actually a button.

When Microsoft came out with the ribbon, I thought, this is bad.

To be fair to Microsoft, I have used programs where the ribbon actually made sense and improved the work flow. But they were graphical designs programs that present objects on the ribbon that you could easily select and drag onto the design surface. On the other hand both Word and Excel regularly piss me off when I have to find something on the ribbon.

Apple's adventures in skeuomorphism were pretty awful(the 'stitched leather' iCal UI? 'Game Center' and its straight-from-vegas textures? the period where every goddamn UI element was made to look like brushed aluminum, despite the fact that neither CRTs nor LCDs can actually emulate the look of reflective metal very well? iBooks hideous woodgrain shelves?); but whoever ended up carrying out the purge seems to have forgotten that there is a difference between slavish visual copies of real objects and the visual cues necessary to make a conceptual model of a real object usable.

A 'button', say, doesn't need to look like any particular physical button; but if it doesn't have some sort of border the 'a specific location that can be pressed to provide some sort of input' concept becomes a lot more confusing, because now you have to guess what the location is. You don't need to(and probably shouldn't) do some horrible bitmap clone of the buttons on your favorite 70s stereo; but you can only cut away so much before you lose the metaphor and end up with something that is neither an intuitive evocation of a real world item nor a new mode of interaction; but just sort of sucks.

The latest controls in Mac OS X "El Capitan" are so flat that you can barely tell the difference between a disabled and an enabled control. There has to be at least one of each in a single area to be able to tell that there is a difference. If an area only has one sort, you can't tell by looking which it is - you have to tentatively click to see if it's going to do anything. And if it turns out it's enabled, you probably then have to undo whatever it did.

Drag all icons off the launcher bar. Drag command prompt to launcher bar. Open up as many command windows as will fit on your screen. Boom. Done. Well, you could also optionally set your bash profile to start emacs in the command window, depending on your UI preferences.

I read the article, expecting a typical no-thought blog rant, but this post is actually quite good (although it's rambling and too long). They discuss the principles of Dieter Rams, and show how Apple is horribly failing to follow them. They track the changes in Apple's interface guidelines over time. So there is actually some useful information in this post (unusual). Here are their main two complaints, things that Apple is missing:

1) Discoverability: The iPhone has plenty of gestures that don't have visual cues....it's often unknown whether clicking on text will perform an action, the latest iOS has "25 secret features." They shouldn't be secret, they should be discoverable to the users.2) Consistency: Sometimes the back button is there, sometimes it's not. Sometimes gestures do things, sometimes they don't. The "mighty mouse" gestures work differently than the trackpad gestures, etc (more examples in article).

This chart really captures the changes at Apple [fastcompany.net], showing the changes in their UI guidelines over time. They've lost an entire section called "managing complexity in your software." Maybe Apple thinks software is no longer complex?

Form follows function, that is, you have to make your product work first, and then make it beautiful. If you have a beautiful product that doesn't work, then you have a "gold-plated brick."

even when checking to always show scroll bars in general preferences, it happened until recently that scroll bars would disappear in some applications or worse: be there and disappear if the mouse came close to them as if somebody played a hoax. Seems to fixed now in ElCapitan. Minimal is good but too minimal can sometimes look like a bad joke.

Seems like the whole industry, not just Apple, has succumbed to the same ethos in UI design. Gone are borders and shading. Can't have more than one obvious hamburger menu icon. It is all white on white other than lots of rectangles filled with imagery, probably updating the imagery frequently. Past that controls are hidden swipes, slides, presses and all guesses.

When Apple started making PowerBooks, the logo on the top cover was oriented so that it's upside down when the laptop is open. Why did they do something dumb like that? Because user testing showed that people naturally tended to orient the logo so it looked right-side-up to them before trying to open the laptop. In other words, it worked better for the user to orient it that way.

Unfortunately, that meant that someone looking at a PowerBook user saw the logo upside-down. How awkward! How unflattering! How inelegant! This simply won't do! So, the change was decreed: logos must be oriented to look nice to the audience, and users just need to train themselves to deal with it.

Old vs. new. Optimized for use vs. optimized for appearance and impression.

That anecdote lacks some power, because just about every other laptop manufacturer uses the 'logo upright when opened' orientation. It's not just an Apple thing, and it has really become an expected part of laptop design.

Huh, I just tested your theory. I just took a look at my Lenovo Thinkpad X220, a laptop I chose for functionality/reliability, not style. Logo upright for the user when closed. Went to check my wife's T410, same.

Although I use a Mac Pro (the last non-cylinder version, I like my multiple internal drive bays thank you very much), I only tried a Macbook once and I found it had quite a lot of shortcomings compared to something like a Thinkpad (the most serious problems where when using it with an external monit

It's all these moron programmers out there. Really a UI interface to get to a function is you SHAKE the phone. What the fuck is that?

I really want to blame the horrible professors at the universities, but I know it's these stupid under 30 programmers that are doing shit that they think makes sense and ignoring real UI design rules. but ohhh it looks pretty!

Dear mobile app programmers, pray I don't win a lotto because I will be making a sack of doorknobs and looking for each and every one of you that code with the stupidest UI ideas. It will be at night when you least expect it.

I don't think Apple is new to poor user interface design. I installed iTunes (because there was no other easy way to put music on the dumb thing) and tried to copy some music files to the iPod. What a nightmare. That was a few years ago. I remember wondering what all the fuss about the "Apple user experience" was about. It seemed like the worst thing since Windows to me.

Previously, I had used SanDisk Sansa mp3 players. They couldn't have been simpler or easier to use. Apple could have learned a lot from them, if they cared about anything but trying to extract as much cash out of you as possible.

Disclaimer: I own Apple stock (which has been very good to me) but no Apple products. Please keep buying Apple products...I'm sure the usability will improve.

You know, I've read a lot of anti-systemd rants on here and other boards and there's always one of two angles. One: Rants about how it breaks the Linux culture of development and the "do one thing well" general policy. Two: Rants about how bad things could theoretically be if there is a problem. Not one post on any board has cited an actual problem they have encountered and how it damaged their infrastructure or workflow. I am not for or against systemd but, with the general consensus of the posters, the

Look again, please. systemd breaks stable network configurations by unnecessarily replacing dhcp, it breaks daemon-startup debugging, it breaks decades of log analysis tools designed to work with text based rather than proprietezed binary logging format, it's repeatedly broken kernel startups, it's broken the stable model of attached storage being mounted under/media, and the attempts to replace all of "/etc" with a "stateless Linux" model is breaking tools that never volunteered to have anything to do with systemd. It's also breaking cross-platform compatibility of daemon initialization configurations.

A "light Linux user" may not see these issues becuase you wouldn't necessarily be debugging failed daemons, writing cross-platform tools, or trying to integrate stable business software with this latest fad for configurations.

As a UI designer I can unequivocally say, No, no it did not. Mobile devices created a few caveats but did not change a lot about how UI should work. I am sick of these new UI/UX people that seem to think that all the lessons learned about good UI over the previous 30 years is somehow obsolete, meanwhile they keep making UI/UX mistakes that were made 20 years ago! The research and lessons learned from the 1980s and 1990s still apply to UI design today on mobile devices as they do on desktops and laptops. One major caveat being the input device and the corresponding minimum "click" area difference between a mouse pointer and a finger. There are others, but most are subtle variations on established best practices with only a few exceptions for things like gyroscope or accelerometer interactions.

We did flat interfaces well, and long before we tried faux 3D interfaces. So that argument also falls flat. We didn't replace long established iconography for things like shuffle and repeat settings with textual representations. Why? Because text takes longer for the brain to process! Good UI depends on established graphical standards and commonly used iconography to be successful, building on successes of the past. Now, everyone seems to think they can reinvent the wheel and are failing miserably.

I am all for innovation and new things, but not at the expense of efficiency and usability when applied to UI/UX design. Ive and these other UI/UX idiots need to be slapped and sent back to design school for UI/UX or just stick to hardware!